Category Archives: Storytelling

The Legendary Watanabe no Tsuna Battles the Ibaraki Demon at Rashomon Bridge

Come see me at the Kryolan Professional Makeup booth at IMATS New York, April 14 to see the painted body illustration of this story

by Christopher Agostino

Watanabe no Tsuna was perhaps the greatest samurai of all, legendary even as a child for a strength no man had seen before. As a young man, fighting with the Heavenly Companions alongside the famous samurai Raiko, Tsuna had helped to kill Ichigumi, the Goblin Spider, throwing a giant tree down upon the back of that monstrous earth spider while Raiko fought him off in the cave beneath Kyoto castle.

One of several prints by Kuniyoshi depicting the battle

Watanabe no Tsuna had again been at Raiko’s side when he killed the Drunken Demon. Once, the Drunken Demon had once been a handsome courtier who preyed on the noble women only with his charms, but, deep in his lustful ways, as he began to drink he began to change into a true monster. He would steal the young women from the emperor’s palace, and hold them captive for his pleasure. When he grew tired of them he would eat their flesh and drink their blood to feed his demon strength. Then he kidnapped the Princess Ibaraki, and she was too beautiful to grow tired of, so he kept her alive for many years. One night in his room, perhaps to dull the pain in her heart, Princess Ibaraki joined him in his drinking and, once drunk, she tasted his feast of human sashimi. She too became a demon, though she kept her secret from the other captive maidens. When the samurai Raiko and his companions came to rescue the Princess it was fortunate that she had also drunk from the saki they had drugged to incapacitate the demon or she would have raised the alarm when Raiko came into the sleeping demon’s room and cut off his head with one swing of his sword. Tsuna saw the beautiful Ibaraki lying asleep in the demon’s bed and released her along with the other captive maidens, not knowing her terrible secret. Continue reading →

Waking up to a joke…a song…a story — Bruce Springsteen and Jon Stewart’s take

Sometimes when I am performing, an idea for a new story pokes at me. Sometimes it comes to me in a dream as I sleep and I have to rush to write it down in the notebook beside my bed before it fades. And sometimes the story wakes me up at 4:00 am.

I know I’m not alone in this, but it still is gratifying when the real master folk I admire talk about the same creative process I experience. In Jon Stewart‘s interview of Bruce Springsteen in Rolling Stone, March 29, 2012, Springsteen talks about how when he’s writing an album the urge is like a “visitation”: “the guitar sits at the foot of the bed, you’re up at 4 a.m., you have the book nearby, the tape recorder…” and Stewart responds: “I used to love that feeling, nothing better than waking up to a joke. You wake up and go, “Shit, it’s right there.” It’s great.”

I agree with part of that. I love the compunction, the waking up in the middle of the night with the urge to write—but I don’t usually get that “Shit, it’s right there” feeling. The middle of the night inspiration is the first step of a journey.  It’s pretty rare that the story springs forth fully formed like Athena. Continue reading →

Old School Style Magical Realism and Quantum Mechanics

by Christopher Agostino

This week I visited a couple of English classes in our local High School to tell some very old folktales. The students are studying the genre of Magical Realism in literature and film. They’d read authors such as Gabriél Garcia Márquez and seen films like Pan’s Labyrinth. I went a little more old school on them to tell a 1000 year old Japanese Demon tale  to get their attention (having just seen the Storytelling in Japanese Art exhibit I had to tell a demon tale). We discussed the universal belief of ancient human cultures in a spirit world and what we today would call magic, and how, from a storyteller’s perspective, modern authors include such elements in fiction to tap in to this ancestral understanding that the world is more than what it appears to be, using magic (or science fiction, for that matter) as a vehicle to open up the reader to new perceptions about their own lives.

It is an old device. When Homer wrote the Illiad and the Odyssey (the oldest examples of Western literature) he was already writing about a time that was mythic from his perspective, and using mythological stories as conceptual archetypes in the way a modern Magical Realist might. As a young actor I was in a version of The Odyssey that might be termed “Realist Magicalism” because it reframed the myth as psychodrama, making it the inner psychological journey of Odysseus from adolescence (reckless hero) to maturity (responsible husband) a la Joseph Campbell’s interpretations of hero tales via Freudian (or perhaps more accurately Jungian?) psychology. Continue reading →